The Nightmare Club: Help! My Brother's a Zombie!
In this instalment of the Nightmare Club series, O’Sullivan inhabits the voice of Annie Graves, master of ceremonies of a spooky sleepover society, where the price of admission is a scary story, and it’s Jack’s turn to tell his.
At first, it may seem a familiar tale of a younger sibling witnessing a brother descend into the indignities of teenagerhood, with all the smelly unsociability that comes with it. However, the changes in Jack’s brother Stephen are extreme – he even tries to bite Jack! Soon after, pets start to go missing from the neighbourhood and then Stephen himself then disappears. Supposedly, he has been sent to boarding school, but why is their attic suddenly bolted shut?
Along with supernatural terrors, O’Sullivan captures a familiar childhood unease of knowing something is amiss in your home, while everyone around you is pretending otherwise. There is also a wonderful description of the abandonment of reason to imagination that happens when you hear an unfamiliar sound during the night. Other horrors are very real and visceral, like a deliciously gruesome description of the discovery of a human fingernail. McElhinney’s illustrations also manage to expertly balance humour and horror. These ink-like etchings brilliantly evoke the tale’s gothic sensibilities along with a sense of silliness. Some pages plunge us into darkness, inviting us to imagine what is happening in the shadows.
This book offers plenty of laughs, with enough scares to satisfy young fans of the macabre, and is sure to inspire some spooky storytelling among its readers.
